5 ms·

Was the Communicator ever really influential? I was in a Nokia dominated market at the time and pagers and then blackberrys seemed to be what actually drove tha

Was the Communicator ever really influential? I was in a Nokia dominated market at the time and pagers and then blackberrys seemed to be what actually drove that side of the market. The Communicator was seen as a curiosity.

zelos 5y ago
I don't think so. I worked on software on the (later model) 9500 and it was awful. Sure, it had a browser, but even over wifi it took minutes to render pages. Anyone I showed the hardware to laughed at it. Series 80 was a dead end too I think? Edit: I hadn't realised how much earlier the 9000 was. I guess in '96 it might have made more impact? I can't remember ever seeing one in use, though.
- Fnoord 5y ago
  A friend of mine worked at a bank and used early Nokia Communicator to remotely administer machines including AS/400. He could do it from his bed while on standby, or while on the go. An absolute game changer. That it had a browser is more of an afterthought. And of course it is slow; GPRS is slow. But if you use the text-based part, and were good with CLI, it was great. I never got to like very small keys, but for me a 'full' qwerty keyboard is a huge upgrade over T9. I never liked nor used T9 much. I avoided it as much as I could. I own a Planet Cosmo Communicator which is a homage to the Nokia Communicator (as well as Palm devices). I also purchased the successor, the Planet Astro Slide, which has a slideout keyboard like the (patented) Nokia N900 (among others, like Symbian-based). The keyboard of these devices is, like the Planet Gemini's, great. That said, I believe a smartphone like Nokia N95 was more of a game changer for the general consumer. And Nokia became popular because of their iconic dumbphones (and their networking pioneering, hence their name reference to town in Finland); not so much their smartphones.
shapefrog 5y ago
It changed the world as clinging to this form and function when it came to 'smart phones' is ultimately why Nokia ended as a viable mobile phone maker.
tannhaeuser 5y ago
Idk if we go by Hollywood's idea of a hacker device, that would be a PDA with separate foldable keyboard (as in Die Hard 4.0).
- gpas 5y ago
  Val Kilmer in The Saint used the first gen Nokia Communicator. Loved everything about that movie when I was a kid.
marban 5y ago
I owned every generation of it and so did many of my colleagues. Can't recall it being regarded a curiosity. More like, serious business machine.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  I had the 9110, 9210, and 9500. None of them really made sense as connected devices because data services were so slow. Web pages would literally take minutes to load, and for heavy use you were paying by the byte. The main benefit was a nice(ish) keyboard for texts and emails. I once wrote and emailed in a consultancy report from the back garden of a pub, just to prove I could. But it's not something I'd have been happy doing regularly. If Psion had somehow added mobile data to their Organisers they'd have killed this market. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_5 The main thing these devices did was normalise ARM and pocketable form factors for serious mobile use. But they were really micro laptops and not large mobiles. They were more like very early versions of the MacBook or Air. The iPhone - rightly - went in a different direction.
  - dejv 5y ago
    Back in early 2000s I worked at company doing pharma CRM for emerging markets in rural places like central Africa, Mongolia and east Russia. We used Nokia commnicators as a client nodes for field representives. The platform was really limited, app development was tricky, but at the end it did the job and there were very few alternatives. We actually ended up using emails as our sync mechanism: internet connectivity in places we served were as limited as you can imagine and also because of device limitation. It worked in a way that changes in data were serialized and sent to server that merged the data into the master and sent you changes back via email as well.
  - fredoralive 5y ago
    Seeing as Symbian descended from EPOC32, the later Nokia Commicators are kinda Psion Series 5s with radio. Of course the mad multiple UI layers Symbian had means they aren't software compatible...
antris 5y ago
It was a high-end device for businesses. The price range made it almost completely out of the question for regular consumers, and it was never meant as a consumer device. But when it was introduced in 1996, sending e-mail and fax and being able to browse the web on mobile was definitely a huge thing for businesses. Mind you, the dial-up internet just had started booming a couple of years earlier. The communicator predated Blackberries, but continued as a product line until 2007. So while the products coexisted in the market, we're still talking about different eras here.
- ollifi 5y ago
  I find it interesting that phones never got cheaper but now they are more useful so large number of people actually consider 1000$ to be ok price to pay for one.
  - sofixa 5y ago
    They did, there are completely usable phones in the 100-200euros segment, which do at least 2/3 of what the 1k ones do, albeit more slowly.
    - Pyramus 5y ago
      Yes, it's a great example of a Pareto distribution where 20% of the price gives you 80% of the features.
    - ollifi 5y ago
      Sure there are decent smart phones that only costs 100 euros, but I was referring to the fact that in 1996 communicator was deemed too expensive for consumer market, but now top of the line iphones sell huge volumes.
      - antris 5y ago
        Phones have become so important in our lives. In 1996, you never needed the internet to do anything, as our society was based on other technologies. People could live their lives without the internet, or even without a mobile phone and it would be no problem at all. Now the internet, and increasingly mobile internet is becoming the default way of accessing almost any service, so having a phone that works for you is something that people are ready to pay for. You end up using it so much, that people feel like it's not a waste of money.
dagw 5y ago
You have to remember how ahead of its time the Communicator was. The first blackberry device was 3 years away and the first one that could make calls was 6 years away when the Communicator was released. It might not have been a huge sales success, but it did show where the mobile phone market was headed years before anybody else.
BuildTheRobots 5y ago
I knew a handful of blind communicator users who loved the device. Apparently text to speach combined with a query keyboard made it significantly more usable than other phones of the time (eg for sms or cli).
- Pyramus 5y ago
  Yes - I knew someone who was deaf and mute, and he was an eager user because it became so easy to communicate in writing.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
In History they have the concept of "The Great Man theory": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory Which ties everything that happened to some individual hero. We do that in tech for people too, but also devices. I think I'd be interested to read a smartphone (and indeed general computing history) that focused on the other elements like the relentless miniaturisation of tech, battery improvements, radio technology, societal adaptations etc. rather than "this obscure/famous person/device invented the future".
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
INTPenis 5y ago
Here in Sweden Nokia was a lot more dominant than Blackberry. My older brother had a Communicator until the lid broke. Later he had another early smartphone from Spectronics, it was controlled with buttons on the sides that you had to learn but once you learned them they were very intuitive.

zelos 5y ago

I don't think so. I worked on software on the (later model) 9500 and it was awful. Sure, it had a browser, but even over wifi it took minutes to render pages. Anyone I showed the hardware to laughed at it. Series 80 was a dead end too I think? Edit: I hadn't realised how much earlier the 9000 was. I guess in '96 it might have made more impact? I can't remember ever seeing one in use, though.

Fnoord 5y ago
A friend of mine worked at a bank and used early Nokia Communicator to remotely administer machines including AS/400. He could do it from his bed while on standby, or while on the go. An absolute game changer. That it had a browser is more of an afterthought. And of course it is slow; GPRS is slow. But if you use the text-based part, and were good with CLI, it was great. I never got to like very small keys, but for me a 'full' qwerty keyboard is a huge upgrade over T9. I never liked nor used T9 much. I avoided it as much as I could. I own a Planet Cosmo Communicator which is a homage to the Nokia Communicator (as well as Palm devices). I also purchased the successor, the Planet Astro Slide, which has a slideout keyboard like the (patented) Nokia N900 (among others, like Symbian-based). The keyboard of these devices is, like the Planet Gemini's, great. That said, I believe a smartphone like Nokia N95 was more of a game changer for the general consumer. And Nokia became popular because of their iconic dumbphones (and their networking pioneering, hence their name reference to town in Finland); not so much their smartphones.

shapefrog 5y ago

It changed the world as clinging to this form and function when it came to 'smart phones' is ultimately why Nokia ended as a viable mobile phone maker.

tannhaeuser 5y ago

Idk if we go by Hollywood's idea of a hacker device, that would be a PDA with separate foldable keyboard (as in Die Hard 4.0).

gpas 5y ago
Val Kilmer in The Saint used the first gen Nokia Communicator. Loved everything about that movie when I was a kid.

marban 5y ago

I owned every generation of it and so did many of my colleagues. Can't recall it being regarded a curiosity. More like, serious business machine.

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
I had the 9110, 9210, and 9500. None of them really made sense as connected devices because data services were so slow. Web pages would literally take minutes to load, and for heavy use you were paying by the byte. The main benefit was a nice(ish) keyboard for texts and emails. I once wrote and emailed in a consultancy report from the back garden of a pub, just to prove I could. But it's not something I'd have been happy doing regularly. If Psion had somehow added mobile data to their Organisers they'd have killed this market. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_5 The main thing these devices did was normalise ARM and pocketable form factors for serious mobile use. But they were really micro laptops and not large mobiles. They were more like very early versions of the MacBook or Air. The iPhone - rightly - went in a different direction.
- dejv 5y ago
  Back in early 2000s I worked at company doing pharma CRM for emerging markets in rural places like central Africa, Mongolia and east Russia. We used Nokia commnicators as a client nodes for field representives. The platform was really limited, app development was tricky, but at the end it did the job and there were very few alternatives. We actually ended up using emails as our sync mechanism: internet connectivity in places we served were as limited as you can imagine and also because of device limitation. It worked in a way that changes in data were serialized and sent to server that merged the data into the master and sent you changes back via email as well.
- fredoralive 5y ago
  Seeing as Symbian descended from EPOC32, the later Nokia Commicators are kinda Psion Series 5s with radio. Of course the mad multiple UI layers Symbian had means they aren't software compatible...

antris 5y ago

It was a high-end device for businesses. The price range made it almost completely out of the question for regular consumers, and it was never meant as a consumer device. But when it was introduced in 1996, sending e-mail and fax and being able to browse the web on mobile was definitely a huge thing for businesses. Mind you, the dial-up internet just had started booming a couple of years earlier. The communicator predated Blackberries, but continued as a product line until 2007. So while the products coexisted in the market, we're still talking about different eras here.

ollifi 5y ago
I find it interesting that phones never got cheaper but now they are more useful so large number of people actually consider 1000$ to be ok price to pay for one.
- sofixa 5y ago
  They did, there are completely usable phones in the 100-200euros segment, which do at least 2/3 of what the 1k ones do, albeit more slowly.
  - Pyramus 5y ago
    Yes, it's a great example of a Pareto distribution where 20% of the price gives you 80% of the features.
  - ollifi 5y ago
    Sure there are decent smart phones that only costs 100 euros, but I was referring to the fact that in 1996 communicator was deemed too expensive for consumer market, but now top of the line iphones sell huge volumes.
    - antris 5y ago
      Phones have become so important in our lives. In 1996, you never needed the internet to do anything, as our society was based on other technologies. People could live their lives without the internet, or even without a mobile phone and it would be no problem at all. Now the internet, and increasingly mobile internet is becoming the default way of accessing almost any service, so having a phone that works for you is something that people are ready to pay for. You end up using it so much, that people feel like it's not a waste of money.

dagw 5y ago

You have to remember how ahead of its time the Communicator was. The first blackberry device was 3 years away and the first one that could make calls was 6 years away when the Communicator was released. It might not have been a huge sales success, but it did show where the mobile phone market was headed years before anybody else.

BuildTheRobots 5y ago

I knew a handful of blind communicator users who loved the device. Apparently text to speach combined with a query keyboard made it significantly more usable than other phones of the time (eg for sms or cli).

Pyramus 5y ago
Yes - I knew someone who was deaf and mute, and he was an eager user because it became so easy to communicate in writing.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

In History they have the concept of "The Great Man theory": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory Which ties everything that happened to some individual hero. We do that in tech for people too, but also devices. I think I'd be interested to read a smartphone (and indeed general computing history) that focused on the other elements like the relentless miniaturisation of tech, battery improvements, radio technology, societal adaptations etc. rather than "this obscure/famous person/device invented the future".

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

INTPenis 5y ago

Here in Sweden Nokia was a lot more dominant than Blackberry. My older brother had a Communicator until the lid broke. Later he had another early smartphone from Spectronics, it was controlled with buttons on the sides that you had to learn but once you learned them they were very intuitive.